Reliable Essays

by Clive James

  There is the usual ration of overcooked metaphors in The High Window (1942). Lois Morny gives forth with ‘a silvery ripple of laughter that held the unspoiled naturalness of a bubble dance’. (By the time you have worked out that this means her silvery ripple of laughter held no unspoiled naturalness, the notion has gone dead.) We learn that Morny’s club in Idle Valley looks like a high-budget musical. ‘A lot of light and glitter, a lot of scenery, a lot of clothes, a lot of sound, an all-star cast, and a plot with all the originality and drive of a split fingernail.’ Tracing the club through the musical down to the fingernail, your attention loses focus. It’s a better sentence than any of Chandler’s imitators ever managed, but it was the kind of sentence they felt able to imitate – lying loose and begging to be picked up.

  As always, the quiet effects worked better. The back yard of the Morny house is an instant Hockney. ‘Beyond was a walled-in garden containing flower-beds crammed with showy annuals, a badminton court, a nice stretch of greensward, and a small tiled pool glittering angrily in the sun.’ The rogue adverb ‘angrily’ is the word that registers the sun’s brightness. It’s a long step, taken in a few words, to night-time in Idle Valley. ‘The wind was quiet out here and the valley moonlight was so sharp that the black shadows looked as if they had been cut with an engraving tool.’ Saying how unreal the real looks makes it realer.

  ‘Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town.’ The High Window has many such examples of Chandler widening his rhythmic scope. Yet the best and the worst sentences are unusually far apart. On several occasions Chandler is extraordinarily clumsy. ‘He was a tall man with glasses and a high-domed bald head that made his ears look as if they had slipped down his head.’ This sentence is literally effortless: the clumsy repetition of ‘head’ is made possible only because he isn’t trying. Here is a useful reminder of the kind of concentration required to achieve a seeming ease. And here is another: ‘From the lay of the land a light in the living room . . .’ Even a writer who doesn’t, as Chandler usually did, clean as he goes, would normally liquidate so languorous an alliterative lullaby long before the final draft.

  But in between the high points and the low, the general tone of The High Window had an assured touch. The narrator’s interior monologue is full of the sort of poetry Laforgue liked – comme ils sont beaux, les trains manqué s. Marlowe’s office hasn’t changed, nor will it ever. ‘The same stuff I had had last year, and the year before that. Not beautiful, not gay, but better than a tent on the beach.’ Marlowe accuses the two cops, Breeze and Spangler, of talking dialogue in which every line is a punch-line. Criticism is not disarmed: in Chandler, everybody talks that kind of dialogue most of the time. But the talk that matters most is the talk going on inside Marlowe’s head, and Chandler was making it more subtle with each book.

  Chandler’s descriptive powers are at their highest in The Lady in the Lake (1943). It takes Marlowe a page and a half of thoroughly catalogued natural detail to drive from San Bernardino to Little Fawn Lake, but when he gets there he sees the whole thing in a sentence. ‘Beyond the gate the road wound for a couple of hundred yards through trees and then suddenly below me was a small oval lake deep in trees and rocks and wild grass, like a drop of dew caught in a curled leaf.’ Hemingway could do bigger things, but small moments like those were Chandler’s own. (Nevertheless Hemingway got on Chandler’s nerves: Dolores Gonzales in The Little Sister is to be heard saying ‘I was pretty good in there, no?’ and the nameless girl who vamps Marlowe at Roger Wade’s party in The Long Goodbye spoofs the same line. It should be remembered, however, that Chandler admired Hemingway to the end, forbearing to pour scorn even on Across the River and into the Trees. The digs at Papa in Chandler’s novels can mainly be put down to self-defence.)

  The Little Sister (1949), Chandler’s first post-war novel, opens with Marlowe stalking a bluebottle fly around his office. ‘He didn’t want to sit down. He just wanted to do wing-overs and sing the prologue to Pagliacci.’ Ten years before, in Trouble Is My Business, John Dalmas felt like singing the same thing after being sapped in Harriet Huntress’s apartment. Chandler was always ready to bring an idea back for a second airing. A Ph.D. thesis could be written about the interest John Dalmas and Philip Marlow take in bugs and flies. There is another thesis in the tendency of Chandler’s classier dames to show a startling line of white scalp in the parting of their hair: Dolores Gonzales, who throughout The Little Sister propels herself at Marlowe like Lupe Velez seducing Errol Flynn, is only one of the several high-toned vamps possessing this tonsorial feature. ‘She made a couple of drinks in a couple of glasses you could almost have stood umbrellas in.’ A pity about that ‘almost’ – it ruins a good hyperbole. Moss Spink’s extravagance is better conveyed: ‘He waved a generous hand on which a canary-yellow diamond looked like an amber traffic light.’

  But as usual the would-be startling images are more often unsuccessful than successful. The better work is done lower down the scale of excitability. Joseph P. Toad, for example. ‘The neck of his canary-yellow shirt was open wide, which it had to be if his neck was going to get out.’ Wit like that lasts longer than hyped-up similes. And some of the dialogue, though as stylized as ever, would be a gift to actors: less supercharged than usual, it shows some of the natural balance which marked the lines Chandler has been writing for the movies. Here is Marlowe sparring with Sheridan Ballou.

  ‘Did she suggest how to go about shutting my mouth?’

  ‘I got the impression she was in favour of doing it with some kind of heavy blunt instrument.’

  Such an exchange is as playable as anything in Double Indemnity or The Blue Dahlia. And imagine what Laird Cregar would have done with Toad’s line ‘You could call me a guy what wants to help out a guy that don’t want to make trouble for a guy.’ Much as he would have hated the imputation, Chandler’s toil in the salt-mines under the Paramount mountain had done things for him. On the other hand, the best material in The Little Sister is inextricably bound up with the style of Marlowe’s perception, which in turn depends on Chandler’s conception of himself. There could be no complete screen rendition of the scene with Jules Oppenheimer in the studio patio. With peeing dogs instead of hot-house steam, it’s exactly the same lay-out as Marlowe’s encounter with General Sternwood in The Big Sleep, but then there was no filming that either. The mood of neurotic intensity – Marlowe as the soldier-son, Sternwood/Oppenheimer as the father-figure at death’s door – would be otiose in a film script, which requires that all action be relevant. In the novels, such passages are less about Marlowe than about Chandler working out his obsessions through Marlowe, and nobody ever wanted to make a film about Chandler.

  In The Long Goodbye (1953) Marlowe moves to a house on Yucca Avenue in Laurel Canyon and witnesses the disintegration of Terry Lennox. Lennox can’t control his drinking. Marlowe, master of his own thirst, looks sadly on. As we now know, Chandler in real life was more Lennox than Marlowe. In the long dialogues between these two characters he is really talking to himself. There is no need to be afraid of the biographical fallacy: even if we knew nothing about Chandler’s life, it would still be evident that a fantasy is being worked out. Worked out but not admitted – as so often happens in good-bad books, the author’s obsessions are being catered to, not examined. Chandler, who at least worked for a living, had reason for thinking himself more like Marlowe than like Lennox. (Roger Wade, the other of the book’s big drinkers, is, being a writer, a bit closer to home.) Nevertheless Marlowe is a daydream – more and more of a daydream as Chandler gets better and better at making him believable. By this time it’s Marlowe vs. the Rest of the World. Of all Chandler’s nasty cops, Captain Gregorius is the nastiest. ‘His big nose was a network of burst capillaries.’ But even in the face of the ultimate nightmare Marlowe keeps his nerve. Nor is he taken in by Eileen Wade, superficially the dreamiest of all Chandler’s dream girls.

  It was a near-run thing, however. Chandler mocked romantic writers who
always used three adjectives but Marlowe fell into the same habit when contemplating Eileen Wade. ‘She looked exhausted now, and frail, and very beautiful.’ Perhaps he was tipped off when Eileen suddenly caught the same disease and started referring to ‘the wild, mysterious, improbable kind of love that never comes but once’. In the end she turns out to be a killer, a dream-girl gone sour like Helen Grayle in Farewell, My Lovely, whose motherly clutch (‘smooth and soft and warm and comforting’) was that of a strangler. The Long Goodbye is the book of Marlowe’s irretrievable disillusion.

  I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars. When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living-room and sipped it and listened to the ground swell of the traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big, angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him.

  Even Marlowe got caught. Linda Loring nailed him. ‘The tip of her tongue touched mine.’ His vestal virginity was at long last ravished away. But naturally there was no Love, at least not yet.

  Having broken the ice, Marlowe was to be laid again, most notably by the chic, leg-crossing Miss Vermilyea in Chandler’s next novel, Playback (1958). It is only towards the end of that novel that we realize how thoroughly Marlowe is being haunted by Linda Loring’s memory. Presumably this is the reason why Marlowe’s affair with Miss Vermilyea is allowed to last only one night. (‘ “I hate you,” she said with her mouth against mine. “Not for this, but because perfection never comes twice and with us it came too soon. And I’ll never see you again and I don’t want to. It would have to be for ever or not at all.” ’) We presume that Miss Vermilyea wasn’t just being tactful.

  Anyway, Linda Loring takes the prize, but not before Marlowe has raced through all his usual situations, albeit in compressed form. Once again, for example, he gets hit on the head. ‘I went zooming out over a dark sea and exploded in a sheet of flame.’ For terseness this compares favourably with an equivalent moment in Bay City Blues, written twenty years before.

  Then a naval gun went off in my ear and my head was a large pink firework exploding into the vault of the sky and scattering and falling slow and pale, and then dark, into the waves. Blackness ate me up.

  Chandler’s prose had attained respectability, but by now he had less to say with it – perhaps because time had exposed his daydreams to the extent that even he could see them for what they were. The belief was gone. In The Poodle Springs Story, his last, unfinished novel, Marlowe has only one fight left to fight, the war against the rich. Married now to Linda, he slugs it out with her toe to toe. It is hard to see why he bothers to keep up the struggle. Even heroes get tired and not even the immortal stay young forever. Defeat was bound to come some time and although it is undoubtedly true that the rich are corrupt at least Linda knows how corruption ought to be done: the classiest of Chandler’s classy dames, the richest bitch of all, she will bring Marlowe to a noble downfall. There is nothing vulgar about Linda. (If that Hammond organ-cum-cocktail bar in their honeymoon house disturbs you, don’t forget that the place is only rented.)

  So Marlowe comes to an absurd end, and indeed it could be said that he was always absurd. Chandler was always dreaming. He dreamed of being more attractive than he was, taller than he was, less trammelled than he was, braver than he was. But so do most men. We dream about our ideal selves, and it is at least arguable that we would be even less ideal if we didn’t. Marlowe’s standards of conduct would be our standards if we had his courage. We can rationalize the discrepancy by convincing ourselves that if we haven’t got his courage he hasn’t got our mortgage, but the fact remains that his principles are real.

  Marlowe can be hired, but he can’t be bought. As a consequence, he is alone. Hence his lasting appeal. Not that he is without his repellent aspects. His race prejudice would amount to outright fascism if it were not so evident that he would never be able to bring himself to join a movement. His sexual imagination is deeply suspect and he gets hit on the skull far too often for someone who works largely with his head. His taste in socks is oddly vile for one who quotes so easily from Browning (‘the poet, not the automatic’). But finally you recognize his tone of voice.

  It is your own, daydreaming of being tough, of giving the rich bitch the kiss-off, of saying smart things, of defending the innocent, of being the hero. It is a silly daydream because anyone who could really do such splendid things would probably not share it, but without it the rest of us would be even more lost than we are. Chandler incarnated this necessary fantasy by finding a style for it. His novels are exactly as good as they should be. In worse books, the heroes are too little like us: in better books, too much.

  1977: previously included in At the Pillars of Hercules, 1979

  Postscript

  The most terrible thing that ever happened to Raymond Chandler was not his failed suicide attempt but what was said by one of the cops who were called to the scene. The cop said that Chandler dramatized himself. One is sure he did, although he never admitted it in print. He wanted to appear hard-bitten; the turmoil in his own soul was off limits; and his determination to keep it that way was the chief reason why he remained a writer of genre fiction despite the talent which always promised something else. Whether something else would necessarily have been something better is another question. Examining his own thought processes would have given him more to take in, but by temperament he was not particularly exploratory even when it came to the outside world, a less dangerous place: he was essentially one of those house-bound writers who take their ivory tower with them wherever they go, even into the underworld. A few months on the fringes of the low life gave him the atmospheric details for a whole career, as we can tell by the way they steadily go out of date when we read him through. In Hollywood he barely left the bungalow: he was right in the middle of the richest single subject America could present, but the thought of writing about it either never occurred to him or posed too great a challenge to his protective self-regard. Instead, sadly for both him and us, he wrote for Hollywood, fulfilling the requirements.

  He did the same for his genre, except that he over-fulfilled them. The thrill of his books was that they were so much better written than they needed to be. The thrill remains. I still go back to him: not for his stories, which despite their wilful complexity seem thinner all the time, but for the rightness of the metaphor, the balance of the sentence, the drive of the paragraph. If I had not already grown out of genre fiction when I started to read him, he would have helped me to. He was right about style – which is, after all, the only thing we take away from that warehouse of expendable fables we absorbed when we were young. The style was the substance. From all those hundreds of jobbing writers who give us their candy-flavoured fantasies, we synthesize an ideal of resonant narrative, and look for it again in the artists who give us reality. There could be a worse way in. Think what it would be like to be brought up on literature: neat gin through a rubber teat, and rump steak for pabulum.

  2001

  PRACTICALLY ART

  SOULS ON ICE:

  TORVILL AND DEAN

  Tomorrow in Ottawa the World Championships commence in which Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean will defend their ice-dance title for the last time, so this might not be the only article on the subject in today’s newspapers. But it will be the only article on the subject written by someone whose own talent for ice-dancing is beyond question.

  It was at Peterborough last year that I invented the difficult ice-dancing manoeuvre now generally known in the sport as ‘landing on the money’. The rink was crowded and I was attempting to astonish my small daughter with sheer speed. Twenty-five years had gone by since I had last skated, but all the old style was still there – ankles touching the ice, nose level with the knees, arms flailing.
Tripping over some young fool’s trailing skate, I took off, sailed high, and fell with my body so perfectly arched that my upper thighs were the first part of it to hit the ice. The small change in my trouser pocket was driven through the flesh almost to the bone. The purple bruise could not only be seen for weeks afterwards, it could be read: ELIZABETH D. G. REG F. D. · 1976.

  So what follows is essentially a tribute from a fellow-skater. But by now, however distinguished one’s qualifications, there is no hope of attaining piercing new insights into the art of Torvill and Dean. A whole literature already exists. In addition to John Hennessy’s excellent book Torvill and Dean (David and Charles, 1984) there are deeply researched magazine articles without number, down to and including Family Circle’s indispensable analysis of how Jayne cossets her dry skin, ‘cleaning with RoC gentle milk and tonic and moisturising with Clinique’. All one can do, while quietly cosseting the embossed bruise on one’s thigh, is to attempt a synthesis.